What is the difference between natural law and positive law?

Libertarianism is based on natural rights; why is Svetov against them?

анонимный вопрос

In a recent video by Mikhail Svetov, which your question is about, much seemed strange to me. Since that is the case, I will first go through the entire video and then move on to the topic of the question, so as not to make two posts about one video.

To begin with, Svetov uses a definition of anarchy as a Hobbesian war of all against all. I don’t remember if Hobbes used the exact word anarchy; I recall the term state of nature more. However, in our video on the deterrence doctrine, I tried to show that a war of all against all is not the natural state of society, meaning that Hobbesian (and Svetovian) rhetoric is based on a dubious foundation.

Svetov also uses the word rights as a synonym for the word privileges, thereby limiting himself to so-called positive rights. This is indicated by his phrase “fear people who want to grant you rights.” Libertarian discourse, however, usually concerns negative rights, which are freedoms. One is not “granted” such rights, because their realization does not require the actions of others; non-interference is entirely sufficient.

In attacking liberals, Svetov implies progressives of the American type, given that he uses headlines about minority quotas and affirmative action as illustrations. In Europe, they more often call themselves social democrats, and it is unclear to me why Svetov separates them from socialists at all, saying that from one side we are pressed by a socialist boot and from the other by a liberal one, while in fact he is speaking of the same socialist boot.

Another interesting point: Svetov opposes morality and conscience, claiming that evil liberals removed conscience from man and replaced it with morality. However, Svetov does not define what conscience is and where it comes from, if not from the experience of interacting with other people and the memory of their moral evaluations. Or does he want to say that conscience is the voice of God? Well, in that case, it is unclear what he has against natural rights, understood as divine decrees.

Another phrase that Svetov uses in his video: “where there is no law, there is no crime.” Yes, that is correct; crime is a term from positive law, which is a system of commands. There is a command, someone violates the command, they have committed a crime. In private law, there are no crimes; there is property damage, breach of contractual obligations, and so on, and the person who suffered the damage is free to oppose this and demand compensation—or not oppose it and not demand it.

Thus, I would say that Svetov’s video is simply a juggling of terms. We define anarchy in a way that no anarchist defines it, after which we prove as simply as two plus two that anarchy is bad, and even that the state is anarchy. Everything is logical, but we get nothing but confusion in the end.

Now let’s return to the question of whether libertarianism grows out of natural law. Historically, yes, but today that is not important because human thought has not stood still. We can derive libertarian principles deductively based on the laws of logic: here is an apodictically true statement that a person belongs to themselves; now we show that any attempt to refute this statement implicitly relies on the very premise we are trying to refute. Those whose brains haven’t melted have grasped the Tao and discovered natural law. Or we can examine human interactions and show which behavioral strategies prove more advantageous and therefore survive through natural selection. This utilitarian approach gives us the same libertarian principles, but in this case, the laws of logic do not stick out as if they were god-given and people were merely objects under them. Therefore, such an approach is less irritating to people like the hypothetical Mikhail Svetov with their obsession with ethics, but more so to connoisseurs of mathematical rigor.

Personally, I first became acquainted with Rothbard and the Hoppean derivation of the principle of self-ownership, and then with Hayek and the Friedmanite utilitarian justification of property, and I suggest not arguing over whom to love more—father or mother. Both praxeology and spontaneous orders are two equally useful methodological principles; let us use both, depending on the situation, rather than imitating Svetov, who is so right-wing that he tries to bite off libertarianism’s left leg.

Rule-making without the state

Everything is clear with the economy — it’s based on blockchain. But what about the ideology? Not in terms of party differences, but how to self-organize? Who produces politics?

Gastello

If there is no state, by what laws will criminals be judged? And who will issue the laws?

Bvl72

From the perspective of the state’s creators, it must be a monopoly on legitimate violence and a monopoly on making final decisions. This is required to perform the two key functions of the state: robbery and arbitrary rule, namely taxation and rule-making. And while in the economic sphere it is generally clear that it is better without robbery than with it, and that any economic benefits the state strives to provide would be provided better and cheaper by a private individual in a free market, many reach a deadlock regarding rule-making: who will ensure that everyone follows a single set of rules?

Fortunately, this problem does not need to be solved. Rules do not have to be uniform; they have to be convenient. The concept of rules is embedded in humans literally at a biological level. Even young children develop rules for playing in a sandbox. The more established a company becomes, the clearer and more developed its rules are. Rules appear in any chat or other club, and people actually appeal to them with even greater seriousness than to state laws, because state laws are for lawyers to study, while people need the rules themselves.

Rules can exist as text or simply as a set of assumptions. Compliance with rules can be monitored by a specially appointed moderator, or simply by everyone. Rules can be immutable, or they can be regularly revised. For breaking the rules, one might be expelled from the collective, hit on the forehead with a candelabra, or have an eleven-meter penalty kick taken against them. But what would definitely not occur to anyone without a state is to collect absolutely all rules into a single code, from football and preferance to the order of taking out the trash and washing dishes in the family.

Nevertheless, for greater efficiency in creating rules, certain general principles are usually laid as the foundation for their composition. For example, if there are different roles in a collective, different standard powers may be provided for them, but within a single function, it is more convenient for its holders to be subject to the same norms, whether it be football or organizing production. When organizing a competition, it is appropriate to ensure equality of conditions for the competitors, whether it be preferance or an auction. It is appropriate to explain existing norms to a newcomer, and until they have mastered them, it is appropriate not to hold them to the full severity of the rules, whether it be an internship in production or mitigated criminal penalties for teenagers. If a judge is appointed to monitor compliance with rules, they must not have an interest in the process they are judging, or they must not have the right to judge themselves.

The question of what happens if different groups have different rules is also contrived. The rules of football and chess do not conflict; each is created for its own game, and if a football player and a chess player go to a bar, they follow the rules of behavior in a bar. If it suddenly turns out that people are in a situation where there are no rules, or everyone is used to following their own, they either try not to bother each other or they develop common norms. For instance, newlyweds quickly set aside what their own parents taught them and form their own norms. For instance, meeting on a mountain path, people look at each other and silently decide who will press against the rock and who will squeeze past them closer to the cliff. For instance, farmers will agree among themselves how long to wait for the owner of an abandoned plot to appear before it is appropriate for a neighbor to claim it, and how to proceed if the previous owner does appear afterward.

But, of course, in a complex and global world, uniform norms can certainly exist for millions of people, or even for the entire population of Earth. For example, popular languages have hundreds of millions of users; very few connector standards for external devices connected to computers have taken hold worldwide, and there is only one markup language for web pages. Global rules can be quite detailed, and their development can be handled by entire consortia involving many companies. Such standards will be followed simply because it is more convenient.

Some sensible norms are also contained in the existing legislations of individual states. Some of them will continue to exist after the state, if using the ready-made ones proves more convenient than developing them from scratch.

*Bet you can come up with great rules for the game in this picture in five minutes?*

Parasite or symbiont?

Today I was in Bangkok, at the Temple of the Emerald Buddha. There is nothing to do there: the Buddha is small, photography is forbidden, talking is forbidden; you can only stand and think about the meaning of all existence. That is what I did. I have never been into meditation, so I don’t know how similar this was to it, but at some point, I suddenly grasped the entire beautiful and amazing picture of spontaneous orders—how the simplest rules followed by people give rise to the most complex and exquisitely coordinated mechanisms of human interaction.

The state was there too, and it also appeared in the form of something very similar to spontaneous orders. After all, it also grows out of people following fairly simple and uniform rules, but it forms the most complex and sophisticated mechanisms of robbery and deception. There were no total clichés in this revelation, such as identifying society and the state as yin and yang, eternally struggling and interpenetrating; rather, the state became increasingly indistinguishable from society.

Anyway, then I left the temple, shook myself off a bit, and began to reflect in the usual European way.

Zolotoryov defines spontaneous orders as the stable result of people observing simple rules, which is formed unintentionally and is useful for the members of society. The word “useful” in this definition smells of voluntarism, and it would be better to do without it. The state is also formed from people observing simple rules, and for some time now, the result of their observance has also become quite stable. What are these rules?

Early states were formed by following the rule “take your neighbor as an accomplice and rob the stranger.” Such states, as Zolotoryov correctly notes, usually disappeared without a trace shortly after the death of the founder, and people returned to the familiar stateless society.

Then, having established themselves where people had nowhere to flee, states mutated—that is, basically, the rule that formed them began to change. Now it became this: “there is a special breed of shepherds; they have the right to eat the sheep, but in exchange, they are destined to protect them from wolves.” To be more precise, that is how I phrased the ideological justification for the new type of state, but the rule became something like: “if you feel you have the strength to lead the herd, become the shepherd, and it is yours.”

This is an extremely stable construction that still works perfectly in paternalistic societies, and especially vividly in Thailand, where the authority of the royal power is very great, criticism of the king is unthinkable, and yet, regarding each king, people proudly tell not of what lands he annexed or how many captives participated in his triumph, but how many temples, universities, and bridges he built.

But liberal ideas ripened in European society, and the state mutated again—that is, the rule whose observance forms the new type of state changed once more. Now it sounds roughly like this: “if you can convince a sucker that you know how things should be done, then lead them.”

So here it is. The consistent observance of this rule should lead to a state that is exclusively herbivorous and, generally, harmless, because if you don’t convince the sucker that you know how things should be done, you will have to leave them alone. And if the sucker is convinced by someone else, then they are that person’s cash cow. In other words, such a rule should produce panarchy, which has been mentioned several times on this channel.

It’s just that from the time of the French Revolution until roughly the Cuban Revolution, a strange intermediate version of the rule worked: “if you have convinced enough suckers that you know how things should be done, then take them as accomplices and rob everyone as best you can.” Obviously, the resulting state turns out to be very unstable: suckers make poor accomplices, and they lose faith quite quickly—while they have to be paid an enormous amount for their complicity in the robbery. This gave rise to the total debt crisis of modern democracies, constant popular unrest over trifles that would have been completely unnoticed by the subjects of a shepherd-type state, and other symptoms of malaise.

Well, the next mutation of the state-forming idea after panarchy should logically be (okay, not logically, but in my revelation, it is exactly so) a formulation like this: “don’t treat people like suckers, and you will be able to sell them more.” And that, kids, is ancap.

Om!

March 8

Congratulations for March 8th are already starting to arrive, which is a great occasion to say a few words about gender equality.

Law is a spontaneous order. Here in our cozy chat, we decided to analyze one article per day by Vladimir Zolotorev from the series “What is the State and Where Does it Come From”. Today we happened to reach the article “Morality and Law”, which worked out perfectly.

I have repeatedly defined law as a complex of approaches to conflict resolution. Zolotorev goes further and describes it as a language of human interaction, meaning all spontaneously emerging rules that people follow when interacting with one another.

Within both my definition and Zolotorev’s, there is no such thing as gender equality. It simply does not emerge spontaneously, due to clear differences in approaches to human interaction, or even at least to conflict resolution, if we narrow the topic to my definition of law.

A sufficiently obvious reason why representatives of different biological sexes tend to use different approaches to interaction is that human behavior is largely hormonally determined, and hormone levels differ between the sexes. However, the higher the level of abstraction of the rules, the smaller the role these differences play, and that is normal. Therefore, demanding gender equality at the family level is damn strange, while at the level of large communities, it is damn natural. There is no contradiction here; one simply should not force absolutes everywhere and engage in Procrusteanism (damn, I’m starting to self-cite and invent my own language; soon I’ll become completely incomprehensible to the reader).

*Happy holiday, everyone! I want to go to the sea!*

Why do libertarians ask specific questions, such as “at what age does a person become a subject of law” and the like?

If I understand correctly, all possible rules/laws fall under the competence of the contractual jurisdiction, which can establish any rules on its territory, including the age of majority, and may adopt anything from a Sharia court to any other system, being limited in the adoption of laws only by the NAP regarding other jurisdictions—that is, entities that have not entered into an agreement with them to comply with their rules. Meanwhile, the institution (I don’t know what to call it if not a state) that legally stands above the jurisdictions is not concerned with establishing such specific rules, but only monitors compliance with the NAP. I admit that I may be catastrophically mistaken, as I have only recently become acquainted with libertarianism, and I would be glad if you could clarify these nuances regarding jurisdictions and their right to establish any rules on their territory.

анонимный вопрос

Regarding contractual jurisdictions, I have already had to answer. In short: a jurisdiction is not a territory, but a venue (legal competence), and a contractual jurisdiction differs from any other by its voluntary nature. Specific parties to a specific conflict agreed to have their case heard in a specific court and entered into a contract with that court. But today, for once, we are not talking about the court, but about the rules, so jurisdictions have nothing to do with this at all.

Any owner of a territory can theoretically establish any conditions under which they are willing to tolerate the presence of outsiders on their territory. Outsiders can either follow these rules or sabotage them if they believe that the potential costs of sanctions for sabotage are lower than the costs of following the rules.

The closer the rules established by the owner of the territory are to those that are understandable and familiar to people, the less effort the owner will have to spend to ensure their compliance. Yes, I can establish a ban on weapons, photography, and clothing on my territory, but if potential visitors to my beach are not yet used to the fact that beaches can be nudist, I will initially have to conduct a long explanatory campaign. And even then, it’s not a given that I will manage to convince people about weapons and photography; perhaps they will only agree to undress, and then I myself will give in and change the rules. Thus, from the sum of many private wishes and actions, spontaneous orders emerge, which eventually constitute our understanding of a norm. It is for this very reason that all these endless discussions of the criteria of “normal” exist.

As a result of many private actions, certain criteria of a norm become practically ubiquitous, receive precise formulations, and become generally accepted principles. In fact, this is exactly what the non-aggression principle is—it is a convenient convention, the observance of which reduces friction in society, and therefore societies that adhere to it tend to prosper. Meanwhile, some criteria of a norm remain purely a matter of taste. In one community, it is the norm to consider a person over 16 years old as having legal capacity, while in another, it is any member of the tribe who has passed the initiation rite, regardless of the age at which they passed it.

Can a libertarian be a grammar Nazi? Specifically, dictate to others how to write, even if they write with mistakes?

anonymous question (paid in the amount of 0.00005btc)

Language is one of the most vivid examples of what Hayek called spontaneous orders. There is no reptilian from the Austro-Hungarian General Staff who could invent a language from scratch for a vast number of people, irradiate them with invisible radiation so that they would acquire this language, and then confidently assert which word forms are true and which are a vile deviation from the norm associated with the shielding properties of a tin foil hat.

I have already spoken about language in quite some detail while answering a question about Esperanto, so I will end the introductory part here and move on to a short answer to the actual question asked.

Of course, a libertarian can be a grammar Nazi. Within their sphere of influence, they can insist on as strict communication standards as they wish, as long as this does not involve the use of violence. you wll udnerstnd me evn if i am strnogly deviatng fr om th stndard, but you will need to exert some additional effort to understand this, therefore the market dictates that I orient myself toward current linguistic norms, which in most cases correspond to dictionary norms. Again, the language in which I write is largely the same language in which I read. Were I fascinated by the poetry of the Tang dynasty, you would certainly feel that influence in the language of my posts. Thus, a grammar Nazi can be understood: he wishes to read in a language that is pleasant to him and provides feedback to his circle of communication. If he does this tactfully enough, and the influence of his authority is great, many will even be grateful to him for this activity in implementing the linguistic norm.

Let us praise the tireless fighters against entropy, for their cause is as noble as it is hopeless, while we ourselves shall speak as we find convenient, ramin!

How will issues of transit territory be resolved under ancap?

(now this is called an easement, i.e., the owner of private land is required by law to provide passage/access through their property for transit traffic, the installation of water pipes, sewage, access to water, etc.)

Personally, I think there will be an analogue of the concept of neutral (international) waters in maritime law for land transit, but how will they decide which part of the land can be considered an easement?

Bitarch (question paid in the amount of 0.01btc)

It is quite easy to imagine how, under conditions of the absolutization of private property rights to land, some landowner demands absolute inviolability of the land, refusing to enter into any negotiations. A person has the right to misanthropy as long as they are willing to pay for it and do not encroach on someone else’s property.

However, it is very difficult to imagine that commercial companies, especially those with multiple owners, would adhere to such misanthropy. As a rule, the goal of a company is to make a profit, not dominance and self-assertion. So, if there is a demand for the installation of utilities across a company’s territory, whether it be a cable or a path, this will generally be perceived as an opportunity to profit by meeting that demand.

Under ancap, any voluntary transactions are legitimate; as for forced ones, they can also easily occur, but apologies and compensation are assumed for them by default.

David Friedman, in “The Machinery of Freedom,” gives as an example of completely justified behavior a lost traveler who breaks into someone’s empty house to make a phone call and call for help, but upon leaving, leaves cash in the house in an amount sufficient to compensate for the inconvenience caused.

But we don’t need to go that far when we have our own taiga nearby. Any winter hut in the taiga is private property, but the doors are not locked, and there is always a certain supply of firewood, grains, and other equipment stored there. Any random passerby can spend the night in a winter hut, and before leaving, they replenish the supplies for the next visitor. This is the established spontaneous order. No one specifically engages in enforcing its observance; these rules of courtesy simply help people live. A society that does not develop such orders is less successful.

Similarly, in Rome, the very concept of easement was invented without any state, within the framework of private law, and there are no grounds to believe that a stateless society of the future would be less sensible than a stateless society of the past.

Thus, under ancap, in sparsely populated areas, the needs of people regarding transit territories will be guarded by a conceptual “bear prosecutor” who upholds the “law of the taiga,” and in densely populated areas—by the desire to obtain market benefit from providing transit through one’s territory. As for the plots of the few misanthropes, who, although they will inevitably be encountered like any other rude people, in the vast majority of cases can be bypassed via some alternative routes.

What’s the deal with Esperanto? Is it worth learning?

Ildar

Language is one of the most vivid examples of spontaneous order arising in society. People have a desire to understand one another, and they use various available means for this purpose; in most cases, this turns out to be the voice, although gestures and facial expressions also retain an important role. The convenience of transmitting information by voice is quite great, and this successful practice becomes embedded in culture, turning into a full-fledged language and gradually being refined: vocabulary tends toward complexity, and syntax toward simplification.

In every sufficiently isolated population of people, its own language develops. You can see this in miniature even in your own family, where there are likely many idioms for internal use that are not used in the outside world. At the same time, as globalization progresses, a reverse trend emerges—toward the unification of language, for now there is a need to understand not only the nearest neighbors but also those with whom contacts occur quite episodically, and there has been no long period of adjustment to develop a communication protocol.

Esperanto is an artificially created language intended precisely to fulfill this task: to facilitate mutual understanding in a global world with minimal common costs for language learning. The fate of Esperanto unfolded roughly as the fate of Bitcoin might have if it had appeared in a world with a gold standard. Yes, Bitcoin is more convenient for transfers than gold, but where is its gold backing? Why are another set of decentralized funds, independent of a trusted intermediary, needed if gold already exists and is actively used? The same goes for Esperanto: yes, one can learn it and become one of hundreds of thousands of speakers, but English is just as widespread worldwide, and it has billions of speakers, for hundreds of millions of whom it is their native language.

So the idea is certainly clever and deserves great respect, but by natural order, people did not follow this idea. However, there is certainly a point in learning Esperanto—some people, for instance, learn Sindarin, and there are surely more speakers of that artificial language in the world than of, say, Vepsian. This means someone needs it.

Of course, forcing humanity to communicate in Esperanto is a solvable task. After all, there are precedents in the world where the Irish artificially recreated their Gaelic and the Jews recreated Hebrew. But the costs for those who would be forced to do so would be very high, and I would prefer that society avoid such a violation of spontaneous orders—there is no need for it, as the natural convergence of languages and the development of machine translation will handle the task much more simply.

How do libertarians view urbanism? It is clear that they do so differently, but are there any common points? I have heard much negativity from members of the LPR towards the projects of Varlamov and Katz.

anonymous question

Mainstream urbanism is a concept according to which cities should be developed using methods of centralized planning, but this planning should be carried out not by some lobbyists, but by experts based on current scientific research. Urbanists are hardly bothered by the fact that present-day scientific developments may contradict those of the past. After all, it is a quite common occurrence when every subsequent electrician who comes to fix the wiring first asks into the void which idiot did the wiring before him.

Naturally, libertarians can conceptually approve only urbanism based on economic theory—in other words, on the idea that the market should not be hindered from solving truly complex issues, such as ensuring spontaneous order in a large city, which is precisely what it is best at.
Thus, libertarian urbanism is the maximum privatization of all public spaces in the city and the maximum deregulation of interaction between the owners of urban spaces.

Supporting preferred initiatives through voluntary donations is precisely an example of spontaneous order at work, where those projects that best satisfy the desires of consumers flourish. You know what to do: 1A7Wu2enQNRETLXDNpQEufcbJybtM1VHZ8

Ancap-chan

I answer questions on ancap, libertarianism, economics, politics, ethics, law and occasionally on abstract topics.

Тег: spontaneous order